The day is finally here - AVC 2014! Starting today, June 21st, 2014, at 9 a.m. at the Boulder Reservoir, teams from around the world will be competing in the greatest autonomous vehicle race ever (or so we’ve been told).

If you can’t join us at the reservoir, you can watch the race as it happens on our livestream. We’ve got four dedicated cameras on the courses, additional cameras in the pits, roving interviews, overhead coverage from one (possibly two) gymbal-equipped quadcopters and a realtime scoreboard, so you won’t miss a second of the action. Check it out here:

Of course, you are still welcome to join us at the reservoir. And why not? It’s a beautiful day, the birds are singing, and the quadcopters are zipping through the breeze. The reservoir is easy to find and we’ve got tons going on, including live demos from some of our favorite companies, food and entertainment. Plus the reservoir itself has a nice beach and is a great place to hang out on a summer day.

If you want to join the conversation on Twitter, we’ll be using #sparkfunavc throughout the day!

Enjoy and may the best bot win!

You can see the full list of scores here. Thanks for a wonderful day - we hope you had as much fun as we did!

The reasoning behind the music is more complex than you might realize.

We are currently using YouTube for our livestreaming needs. This gives us a nice frontend and virtually unlimited capacity (many streaming services charge you per view), but the dark side is that YouTube is hypervigilant about copyright infringement. Their automated systems monitor every broadcast looking for audio and video fingerprints, and if they detect that you’re broadcasting any commercial music or video, even for a few seconds, they can and will shut you down and ask questions never. (Seriously - they don’t provide any channels to contest their actions or claim Fair Use. We’ve been flagged in the past when a presenter showed their own TedX video.)

Thus it became mission-critical for us to avoid capturing any music that the course DJs might be playing at the live event. We did this by pulling an submix from the course mixers with only the announcer’s microphones, which got us most of the way there. But we decided to add library music (helpfully provided by YouTube itself) to: A. provide extra insurance against any commercial music bleed-through, B. it was preferable to completely dead audio (we couldn’t pull ambient audio from the courses due to the above issue, and continuous audio has become the language of broadcast), and C. because sometimes, it’s fun (or at least, I had fun playing overly-dramatic music for some of the cuter robots).

Sorry you didn’t like it. Library music is traditionally (and often hilariously) subpar, otherwise it would be, well, real music. For what it’s worth, we listened to the entire library (shudder) and weeded out the real stinkers. You’re welcome. ;)

Can you play regular YouTube Videos? When the stream is up (Its been down a fair amount) it is playing fine for me. I am watching directly from the YouTube page and it is running in Adobe Flash Player 14.0.0.125.

Try updating Flash Player and making sure it is enabled for your browser..

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